Book Reviewed: Full Service: My Adventures in Hollywood and the Secret Sex Lives of the Stars, by Scotty Bowers

Book Reviewed - Full Service: My Adventures in Hollywood and the Secret Sex Lives of the Stars, by Scotty Bowers

Scotty Bowers from inside Hollywood

This book reads more like a trashy magazine sold at the checkout counters of the grocery stores. The author was a gas pump jockey and a part-time bartender at Hollywood private functions who rose to the level of a close confidant of well-known men and women in Hollywood, including the members of British Royal Family. The author likes to call “tricking” for his “escort service business.” It was a way of hooking of wealthy women and men for illicit affairs during late 1930s to 1970s. There is a long list of names and their fetishes and deviant sexual escapades. Some of his clients were also heterosexuals like Desi Arnaz, Bob Hope, and few others. The book paints a reckless and racy behavior of his clients that his book had to be vetted by a libel attorney before publication.

The author claims that he arranged various types of encounters for Cary Grant, Randall Scott, Tennessee Williams, Raymond Burr, James Dean, Tony Perkins, Montgomery Clift, Rock Hudson, Ramon Novarro, Charles Laughton, Tyrone Power, Edith Piaf, Noel Coward, Desi Arnaz, Spencer Tracy, Somerset Maugham, Lawrence Olivier, Vincent Price, Cole Porter, and finally Camelot couple of mid-thirties Duke (formerly King Edward VIII) and Duchess of Windsor. The author fondly refers to them as Eddy and Wally. Edward's womanizing (and gay) behavior was reckless during 1920s and 1930s. This worried British Prime Minister Baldwin, King George V and the Royal Family. Both Duke and Duchess were known to have many male and female lovers, and the author claims that he arranged the “escort service.” Jimmy Donahue, an heir to the Woolworth fortune also boasted to have a liaison with the Duchess.

Describing the individual nature of his clients, the author observes that Errol Flynn was quite a lothario; he drank so much that he could not satisfy the ladies. Katherine Hepburn did not get along with many people around her, and the author says that the studio generated rumor that she was “madly in love” with Spencer Tracy was false. According to him, there was no evidence of “love for Tracy” during his “close friendship” with Hepburn. In fact she liked ladies, especially young brunettes. Director George Cukor is another well-known homosexual and legendary for wild pool parties was also a top client of the author.

Several critics and book reviewers suggested that this book is partly fictionalized but author and playwright Gore Vidal said many stories are correctly documented.